


Some Things Nannies Can't Do

by lilsmartass



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Fluff, Future Fic, Gen, Humour, Kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-18
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:23:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilsmartass/pseuds/lilsmartass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anecdotes from the Nanny of the Avengers children. Filling a prompt over here at the Avenger Kinkmeme. http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/7293.html?thread=13672317#t13672317</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Things Nannies Can't Do

**Author's Note:**

> Rating: PG  
> Disclaimer: I own the Avengers. I totally do. I’m definitely not lying. You believe me right?   
> Warning/Spoilers: None,   
> Genre: friendship, family, humour,

**Some Things Nannies Can’t Do**

1 Steve’s son James

I’m sitting in one of the opulent sitting rooms, playing dress up with two of the girls and congratulating myself on landing such an excellent job with good pay and such nice kids when there’s a screeching bundle of righteously indignant five year old boy attached to my leg. I’ve only been here a few days, and haven’t quite mastered all their names yet, but I know this one must be a Rogers. He looks just like the Captain, same square jaw despite his face still being rounded with baby fat and same intense blue eyes. “Calm down,” I say, in my best soothing voice, crouching down to be at his level to engage with him, “What’s the problem?”

“Michael and Dean had _two_ cookies off the tray, and you said we could only have _one each_ ,” he reports, filled with virtuous ire at this unfairness.

“Right, well I’ll come and talk to them.” He nods, fringe flopping in his face, duty done, and I send him on his way.

James soon becomes my right hand man. All little kids go through that stage where following the rules is cool (for some that stage is far, far too brief) and James seems to have inherited his father’s desire to do good in spade loads. If one of the older ones fails to follow a rule in James’ presence I can be sure he will come running straight to me within minutes.

“Natalia drank milk out of the carton again!”

“Michael pushed Jörd again!”

“Dean’s trying to crack the code to get into Uncle Tony’s workshop!”

“Philip’s climbing up the wall again.”

“Kim’s drawing on Meg’s face.”

“Jörd turned the cat green _on purpose_.”

And eventually, I have to take him aside. “Jamie look, it’s nice that you follow the rules and understanding that rules are important is very important.”

He nods, wide blue eyes intense and serious, “Daddy says that if everybody just followed the rules and was nice to everyone the world would be a betterer place.”

“And that’s true,” I agree, deciding this is not the moment to correct his speech, “But there’s serious rule breaking, and not serious rule breaking, and telling tales isn’t nice either.”

“Oh,” his little nose scrunches in thought. “Why?”

“Well...” I’m actually not sure. How does one explain to a five year old, mini Captain America that the rules are there for a reason, and everyone should follow them, but that realistically, it’s just not that big a deal if the cat is green for a few hours? “Because if everyone is running around dealing with tiny little problems then the big problems get forgotten don’t they?” I say at last.

“I don’t want to be not nice,” he says mournfully.

“Oh Jamie,” I can’t resist giving him a hug, “You are nice. You’re lovely. You’re my favourite James Rogers in the whole entire world. But try to only come and tell me if it’s a big rule that’s getting broken OK?”

He nods, a short gesture so like his father’s that I know that in twenty years this tiny boy will have women falling at his feet. “OK.”

“OK,” I agree, holding out my hand for him to solemnly shake. Mission Accomplished.

 

2 Tony and Pepper’s son Dean

Quite frankly the fact that Pepper Potts agreed to have not one, but two children with Tony Stark never ceases to amaze me. I mean, the man’s like a giant overgrown toddler himself, except with a gold American Express and an Iron Man suit, so he’s like an unrestrainable overgrown toddler. When I took the job, I’d always assumed the two Stark boys would present the most trouble. Eight and ten respectively, they were everything you expect a mini-Stark to be. They were aristocratically good looking, charming, so intelligent it was a little bit scary and, I had guessed rightly, their favourite hobby was creating trouble. No, that’s not fair, that was their second favourite hobby, or at least Dean’s second favourite hobby.

Like their father, they were both astoundingly good creators. They had their own workshop, which Bruce and Pepper both searched fairly regularly for components which could be used to make anything more dangerous than they were willing for the boys to have, which was how it had become the ambition of Dean’s ten year old heart, to get into his father’s workshop unaccompanied and see exactly what he would need to make a pair of flying Iron Man boots.

Armed with his father’s brilliance, and his mother’s organisational skills, he set about cracking the lock with a diligence. I had of course, grown up reading the Harry Potter books, and, like any other self respecting Marauder fangirl, realised that trying to stop him would be an exercise in futility. Instead, I put JARVIS on the case, requesting that he change the door code on a daily basis, at an unspecified hour, preferably to some combination of Tony Stark’s complex eighteen digit security code the boy had already tried, and proceeded to forget about it.

Which was why I was horribly surprised the day Dean came up with the idea of convincing Jörd to use her burgeoning magic to short out the system, allowing him to break in, steal a pair of the damn boots (what was Tony thinking making them in such tiny sizes) and taking them for a joy ride through the top three floors of the tower. Two screaming matches, numerous attempts at bribery and one of S.H.I.E.L.D.S steel nets later, we got him off the ceiling, but not before he scorched all the panelling in his mother’s office.

I punished him thoroughly, furious and still surfing the residual terror that he could really have hurt himself. I drop Pepper an email to let her know what happened and how sorry I am, and start clearing up the mess. Over the next year, Dean has three more attempts at stealing the boots to repeat his maiden flight, but never again when I am looking after them. “It’s because you left him with no way to talk himself out of trouble, and he’s pretty sure you watch him all the time now” Bruce confides one day over coffee and I smirk.

 

3 Thor and Jane’s daughter Jörd (as accompanied by Tony’s son Michael)

When one is the nanny for the children of a group of superheroes, but only one of those children has magical powers, and is also half Asgardian, one expects that child to be quite a handful. Jörd, surprisingly, was not. Not really. She looked like her father, but for her mother’s warm eyes, and though her frustrations could end with small bursts of magic, those usually ended with the changing of something’s colour, or shorting out the electricity briefly and were nothing more serious than that. She was a serious child, loving to read, nose always buried in a fantasy novel of some description and, even though she was not quite nine, we soon became fast friends, because I had read many of the books she was so intrigued by.

So on the day she didn’t turn up for lunch at the usual hour, I was frantic with worry. I called S.H.I.E.L.D, and the Avengers, the two groups who desperately needed to know if the daughter of Thor had been taken in a hostage plot. We scoured the towers and the grounds, and there was so much activity in looking for Jörd, that it was actually quite a while before we noticed Michael was missing as well. By the time night fell, Pepper and Jane were tearfully comforting one another, and Nick Fury, Thor and Tony were set jawed and planning full scan of the city, an expensive and difficult procedure which required bringing the helicarrier over New York itself, but which would allow them to detect the smallest particle of magic. Even the Fantastic Four had been called in, back up suspected needed. So, when the two children rolled up to the door, dirty and scratched, but laughing gaily there was an immediate sensation.

“Where have you _been_?” Jane wailed, looking torn between hugging and hitting her daughter and settling for gripping her firmly by the shoulders.

Unaware as only a nine year old can be of all the sensation she had caused, Jörd simply grinned her father’s winning grin and said, “We’ve been on an adventure. We went to explore the old docks.”

The adrenaline leaving my body makes me feel like fainting, and the families are too anxiously gathered around one another, seeking to reassure themselves that no one is missing, no one is hurt and nothing is wrong. It is Nick Fury, of all people, who comes and stands next to me. “You did everything right, and you didn’t lose one of them,” he reassures in his deep voice. “You win. Go home, get some sleep, they won’t need you here for a while.”

 

4 Natasha and Clint’s twins, Philip and Natalia

Natasha’s twins are the oldest of the group. Natalia and Philip, and they really don’t see why they can’t join S.H.I.E.L.D right now. Normal stroppy teenagers are difficult enough. Stroppy teenagers that can climb walls a spider would struggle with and secret themselves into holes a mouse wouldn’t fit into and that you _know_ are more deadly with the average piece of cutlery than most soldiers are with automatic weapons are impossible. Normally, I treat them like slightly feral cats. They know when meal times are, and I always plate up a dish for them and they know that I can’t enforce a bedtime rule on them with their room so impossible to reach, but that if I catch them breaking what they know to _be_ the rule that I will have no problems taking my complaints to a higher power and their father certainly can enforce his rules on them. It turns out, Clint Barton is terrifying when he chooses to be. 

I leave them alone, they leave me alone, and though I’ve always tried to make them aware that I’m here if they need it, and indeed, have been asked the odd homework question, by Philip or if I thought a particular colour of hair dye would suit Natalia, it is an arrangement which largely works. But I drew the line at JARVIS, programmed to inform me of any dangerous activities, calmly telling me that they were secreted away in one of the vents, having a serious logistical discussion about how to stowaway onto the jet taking off that night for their parents’ new mission in Hong Kong.

Enraged, I glanced over the younger children, making certain they would be OK, and headed to the nearest accessible point. “Philip Romanov-Barton! And you Natalia, get down here now!” There was nothing but a silence. “I know you’re up there. Do not make this worse.” Sullenly, the pair unfolded themselves and dropped gracefully to land in front of me where I was treated to identical scowls. Undeterred, I folded my arms and scowled right back. “How dare you,” I said.

Philip smirked his mother’s smirk, the one that makes mafia crime bosses rethink their options. “We’re allowed in the vents,”

I cut him off with an outraged hand, “Do not...Just do _not_. All this time, I have treated you like adults, trusted you to follow the rules as they were set down and to deal with everything else sensibly and maturely. Stowing way on an Avengers mission is not sensible or mature.” I hissed.

“Mother started-”

“I don’t care, you will not. When you are twenty one you can endanger your lives however you see fit, until then, if you cannot act as you would like to be treated, you will be treated like the little ones and come for lunch and activities with the rest of us.”

“You can’t make us-”

“If I tell your father this is how I am having to deal with you because of _your own stupid actions_ who do you think he will side with?” Sullen, teenaged silence was my only answer, “Well?” I pushed.

“Fine,” said Philip grudgingly.

I turned to his sister, who gave me only a cold stare and a nod. “Then we’ll say no more about it but if I ever _ever_ hear of something like this again, you will spend your days in the playroom with me.”

I started to head back down the corridor, knowing Kim and Jamie couldn’t be unattended for so long. “We could poison her,” I heard Natalia hiss.

“Try it,” I shot back, not breaking stride, “But any other Nanny you get will side with your mother’s instructions that you’re too young for boys and who will spend all evening on the phone to that nice Ethan Richards then?” There was silence. Huh, maybe I can control the Romanov-Barton’s after all.

 

5 Bruce’s adopted daughter Kim

For obvious reasons, Bruce couldn’t have kids of his own. But, when the tower started filling up with the children of the others, he adopted a beautiful little girl called Kim. I would never have said as much to the others, but Kim was my unashamed favourite. The toddlers always are, because the older ones know you’re just the help and go running to their parents if they don’t like your decisions, but the little ones just know that you play with them and love you unashamedly for it. Kim was like that, just three years old and always climbing on my knee for hugs or stories, my word was law, and it never occurred to her to question it, which was why nothing was too much trouble for her, even if I did feel ridiculous flitting about the tower in a fairy dress and ballet slippers.

But oh my goodness, could that little girl tantrum.

True, she didn’t demand a second opinion from her father when I denied her jelly beans for breakfast, but her ear splitting shrieks brought every Avenger in the tower running, sure someone was being murdered.

But, between the two extremes, she was generally a loveable, happy child, so when I found her one day weeping desolately in a corner I was immediately concerned. “Hey Kimmi,” I said, settling on the ground in front of her and pulling her into my arms, “What’s wrong sweetheart?”

“Not a monster,” she wailed, almost incomprehensible through tears and baby lisp.

“Of course you’re not a monster,” I soothed, rocking her slightly and vowing to make whichever one of the boys who had upset her so much pay, but to my shock, she sobbed even harder. “Kimmi, sweetie, calm down. You’re not a monster, not at all. You’re a pretty little girl.”

“Daddy a monster,” she hiccupped out.

“I- Well...no, he’s not, not...not _really_ ,” I tried to explain.

“He is, he is, HE IS IS IS!” She screamed, gearing up for a full sized tantrum, “Daddy goes green and big and I don’t and IT’S NOT FAIR.”

Arms full of tiny screaming three year old raging about not being a Hulk, I burst into laughter. “JARVIS,” I spluttered eventually, “Page Doctor Banner in his lab. Let him know it’s not an emergency, but that we’d like him up here.” Then I sat back and I waited, there are some things Nanny’s can’t do.


End file.
